FOR THE TRUTH ON JACKIE DU PRE, IGNORE THE MOVIE

John von Rhein, Tribune Music CriticCHICAGO TRIBUNE

`The true story of two sisters who shared a passion, a madness and a man." No, it's not a teaser in the National Enquirer. It's an ad for Anand Tucker's film "Hilary and Jackie," which titillates us well before we enter the theater.

What exactly does this come-on have to do with the movie's subject, Jacqueline du Pre, the British golden girl of the cello who became an international virtuoso well before the age of 20?

The answer, of course, is precious little -- and little more than the selfish, willful, manipulative Jackie so skillfully portrayed by British actress Emily Watson resembles the du Pre musicians and other intimates knew. But that Jacqueline du Pre would not have satisfied the sensationalistic aims of the filmmakers. Nor would it lure many ordinary people into the multiplexes.

Most of the facts of the real du Pre's life and all-too-brief career are well known and are faithfully recounted in two biographies, both titled "Jacqueline du Pre," one by Carol Easton (Summit Books), the other by Elizabeth Wilson (Arcade). Recently the literature was swelled by the publication in softcover of "Hilary and Jackie," a reminiscence by du Pre's siblings, Hilary and Piers du Pre. This "family history," which originally appeared in Britain in 1997 under the title "A Genius in the Family," formed the basis of the movie's screenplay.

A musical phenomenon almost as soon as she left the cradle, the prodigy rose to fame in England well before she was 20, swept through a triumphant international career and wedded pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim in 1967. Their glamorous marriage united two powerful personalities, arguably the most gifted of their generation on their respective instruments. The sparks they ignited in each other you can hear in the handful of recordings they made together: Here are two impassioned musical spirits who don't so much play the music as become it.

Du Pre's future seemed boundless. But in 1971, when she was only 26 and at the height of her success, she began experiencing the symptoms of what was to be diagnosed two years later as multiple sclerosis. The severity of her illness forced her to retire in 1973 after a storybook career that had blazed for little more than a decade. It took 14 more years for the crippling disease to take its toll. At her death, at 42, in 1987, she was generally considered the greatest instrumental soloist to emerge from Britain in this century.

All this could have made for compelling cinema verite. Instead, Frank Cottrell Boyce's screenplay is a tony soap opera masquerading as an intimate glimpse of sibling rivalry and musical genius in extremis. It hinges on the "Rashomon"-like gimmick of telling the same story from each sister's point of view. And it dwells on the revelation -- lifted from Hilary and Piers' book -- that for some nine months in 1971 Jackie enjoyed sexual relations with Hilary's husband, Kiffer Finzi, with Hilary's acquiescence.

But what makes "Hilary and Jackie" go as flat as a snapped cello string is the absurd way it equates musical talent and mental aberration. This is nothing new in cinema. Since the nature of artistic genius cannot be easily depicted on screen, how much simpler it is to portray the truly gifted as troubled misfits and sociopaths doomed to tragic fates.

Such psychobabble is far more offensive than anything Hilary and Piers du Pre give us in their sympathetic, even-handed biography of their sister. A flutist whose abilities were far outstripped by those of her sister, Hilary (played by Rachel Griffiths in the film) has been accused of trying to bring her famous sibling down to her own size. But a close reading of the book does not support the charge. If anything, the anguish Hilary expresses over Jackie's illness, and the devastating effect her physical and mental deterioration had on the family, makes her survivor guilt feel like a contagious disease.

The book may turn weepy in the final chapters, but at least it plays fair with du Pre as vulnerable human being and driven artist. The film distorts both, as Watson plays Jackie as a vivacious but unstable young woman sacrificed on the altar of ambition.

Yes, there is such a thing as poetic license, and, yes, a film should properly be judged whether it's true to its own terms.

But an unsuspecting movie audience doesn't distinguish between film reality and the real world, not when the characters are sketched from life and when they are so credibly portrayed as by Watson and Griffiths.

In its awareness of how to "sell" an artsy subject, "Hilary and Jackie" has profited from the example of "Shine," David Hicks' equally mendacious portrait of the psychologically disturbed Australian pianist David Helfgott. That movie brought its makers success at the box office and numerous awards. Tucker goes as far as to include a fictionalized scene where du Pre suffers a physical breakdown while performing the Dvorak Cello Concerto -- a close parallel with the moment in "Shine" when the young Helfgott goes bonkers during a performance of the third Rachmaninoff concerto.

No wonder Barenboim opposed the filming of the book. Du Pre's record company, EMI, also withdrew its cooperation. Indeed, Barenboim refused Tribune requests for an interview about the movie and has been quoted as saying, "Couldn't they have waited until I'm dead?"

One cannot imagine he would be thrilled by the "revelation" that during du Pre's long decline he set up housekeeping in Paris with Elena Bashkirova, his present wife, and fathered two children by her. What had been an open secret in the music world for many years is used in the film as another means of milking audience sympathy for the terminally ill du Pre, now bound to a wheelchair and isolated from friends and family.

(Actually, the du Pres' book makes clear that Barenboim made certain his ailing wife had everything she needed during her illness and that, after he had done all he could, he made the difficult decision to get on with his own life.)

"Hilary and Jackie" has opened something of a Pandora's box of controversy that can only bolster its chances at the box office. Recently the London Times printed a letter signed by cellists Julian Lloyd Webber and Mstislav Rostropovich, violinists Yehudi Menuhin, Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman, among other musicians, declaring that the film's depiction of the lamented cellist "is not the Jacqueline du Pre that we, as her friends and colleagues, knew."

If you want to hear what the actual Jacqueline du Pre was all about, and how incalculable her death was to music, listen to her first recording (on EMI) of the Elgar Cello Concerto, with John Barbirolli conducting, which so boldly launched her star. In its emotional intensity and extravagant freedom of phrasing, the performance speaks heartbreakingly of a young musician bursting with joie de vivre, a world of possibilities lying ahead of her. The recording has yet to be surpassed.

More intimately revealing is the Teldec video of British filmmaker Christopher Nupen's 1969 documentary "The Trout," which eavesdrops on du Pre as she makes chamber music in the studio and onstage with friends Barenboim, Perlman, Zukerman and Zubin Mehta. Her recordings are du Pre's legacy. They are the "truth." The movie is slick falsity.